Alice-Agnes Gabriel
Tuesday 16 Jun, 15:00 - 16:00
MCS0001
Earthquakes and earthquake-triggered tsunamis are multiscale, nonlinear processes whose understanding challenges both our physical understanding and our computational infrastructure. Large-scale physics-based simulations now allow us to model earthquake rupture, seismic wave propagation, ground deformation, and tsunami generation in a single computational framework, exposing dynamics that cannot be inferred from observations or simplified models alone. Such simulations have become “hero runs” of computational geoscience, enabled by close collaboration between domain scientists, research software engineers, applied mathematicians, and HPC centres. I will discuss how supercomputing is changing earthquake and tsunami science, from rapid-response dynamic rupture models of recent large earthquakes to fully coupled earthquake-tsunami simulations and our 2025 ACM Gordon Bell Prize work on a real-time tsunami digital twin for Cascadia. I will focus not only on the scientific results, but also on the computational and algorithmic challenges underlying them, including meshing, solvers, hardware-aware optimization, uncertainty quantification, inverse problems, and reduced-order modeling. These challenges are central as we transition from individual high-fidelity simulations to ensemble approaches and, ultimately, toward digital twins of earthquake and tsunami systems.
Alice-Agnes Gabriel is an Associate Professor of Geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, with a guest affiliation at LMU Munich, Germany. She received her Diplom (MSc) focusing on Theoretical Physics from TU Dresden in 2008, and her PhD from ETH Zurich in 2013. Her research focuses on computational seismology and earthquake physics, with an emphasis on physics-based modeling of earthquake rupture, seismic and tsunami wave propagation using high-performance computing, routinely utilizing the largest supercomputers worldwide. Her work integrates numerical methods, large-scale simulations, and data-science to address problems central to earthquake hazard assessment and risk reduction. Her research interests span earthquake physics, fracture mechanics, seismic wave propagation and modeling of earthquake cycles and tsunami generation and Gabriel directs several community software efforts. Her group aims at tackling some of the grand challenges of seismology: uncovering the physical mechanisms relevant to understanding earthquakes and tsunamis in the hope of increasing safety during and in the aftermath of these natural disasters.
She has co-authored over 110 peer-reviewed publications, including papers in Science, Nature and the SC Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis. She has also (co-)mentored 32 graduate students (15 PhD and 17 MSc) and 16 postdoctoral researchers (current and former). She serves the scientific community through editorial and leadership roles, including as the current President of the Seismology Division of the European Geosciences Union (EGU). Her contributions have been recognized through multiple competitive honors, including AGU’s 2023 James B. Macelwane Medal which includes AGU Fellowship, the 2020 Seismological Society of America (SSA) Charles F. Richter Early Career Award, an 2019 ERC Starting Grant, and high-performance-computing-focused awards including the 2020 PRACE Ada Lovelace Award and the 2025 ACM Gordon Bell Prize. For more information visit her personal website at https://www.alicegabriel.com/